GOING BEYOND THE BASICS TO HELP THE HOMELESS Working with homeless people during the COVID-19 response has been the highlight of Karen Crook’s long nursing career. Karen worked as the weekend clinical lead of a multidisciplinary wellness team who helped homeless people into accommodation and connected them to health services. “We worked in pairs and went around lots of the areas homeless people frequent and asked them if they would like to get off the street,” Karen says. “Their reaction was amazing – they were so humbled and appreciative and often they were tearful.” Karen says the work has been a privilege, with people taking the wellness team into their trust. “We take a holistic and wellbeing approach. We ask them how they came to be in this situation and while they may be shy initially once they get started they just share their stories,” Karen says. Common themes to their stories include trauma, sexual abuse, mental health issues, drug and other substance abuse, and prostitution. Most of the people Karen and the team helped were male, aged from their teens into their seventies. The majority of people wanted to be homed and stayed in the motels or campground accommodation found for them. Karen says the accommodation providers worked hard to make this a sustainable initiative. A few providers employed kind, empathetic security staff who helped the newly-homed people feel safe.
TRANSFORMING OUR DIGITAL WORKPLACE COVID-19 threw NMH digital workplace transformation projects into full throttle, in particular with the launch of Microsoft 365 (M365). M365 lays the foundation for a modern digital workplace, enabling us to work securely in the ‘cloud’ from any location. It offers a wide range of applications, or tools, including Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) which NMH reached for as a starting point to keep us connected and united during lockdown. What is Microsoft Teams? MS Teams is an online collaborative workspace that brings together team work functions – such as meetings, instant messaging, task-tracking, note-taking and file sharing – in one secure place. MS Teams can be accessed via a web browser or from an app on your preferred device. MS Teams allows us to collaborate with people from other organisations, as hospital radiology teams found very useful. Jess Ettema, Nelson Hospital Radiology Operations Manager (and early MS Teams adopter) says that she
Above: Madhu O’Brien, Karen Crook and Janice Howard were part of the wellness team helping get homeless people into accommodation during lockdown.
“I’ve always been passionate about helping people with mental health and addiction issues, or who have been traumatised, and it’s been good to hear their stories and be able to meet their needs are. Looking back over the past few months I really feel this has been a highlight in my career.”
found the software easy and simple to use. “We’ve connected with our wider networks, including the South Island DHB radiology group. We use it for all our video meetings and it saves us time being able to add updates directly into Teams prior to meetings,” Jess says. MS Teams proved especially helpful during ‘peak pandemic’. “Teams saved my inbox from being bombarded during COVID-19 as information was changing daily. It was so helpful to have a central point for all our communication and to be able share documents securely,” Jess says. “We also now use Teams for our national radiology group in lieu of face-to-face meetings and it’s working well.”
Interested in using MS Teams? All NMH staff have access to Microsoft Teams. Find out how to get started: http://nmhintranet/ organisationsupport/ itandapplicationsupport/O365/ MicrosoftTeams.html
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